The November WASDE report usually involves some tweaking of the numbers by USDA, and that is all it mostly was today, but with some quirky impacts. First, there were a few surprises but not dramatic ones and yet the report spurred larger to outsized volume in trading across the grain and oilseed contracts. There appeared to be an initial overreaction since overall pre-report lower trading initially jumped dramatically higher. January soybeans initially traded as much as 17 cents higher. However, after more fully absorbing the report’s nuances, contract values reversed and then wobbled closer to unchanged. The mixed reactions are understandable in context:CornBullish:USDA lowered 2024/25 corn yield by 0.38 percent, versus an expected sm...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.
WPI recently completed an expansion of our methodology for estimating and forecasting U.S. and global soybean crushing margins. The new approach incorporates the energy market’s expanding influence on the oilseed sector and the structural changes in global biofuel demand. This report is i...
Key Market Insights Macros: Inflation isn’t cooling — it’s moving higher again. March PCE inflation (Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation) rose 0.7 percent month-over-month, pushing the annual rate to 3.5 percent, the h...
An amendment to the U.S. House farm bill, aiming to remove the Save Our Bacon Act language in Section 12006 that would have stripped language to prohibit California’s Proposition 12, Massachusetts’ Question 3, and up to 500 state agricultural laws across the country, was blocked by...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscr...